“The United States stands with the people of Cuba,” declared U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Walz. “We stand for their dignity, for their liberties, and for their freedom.”
“What the United States does not stand with is the communist regime that has failed them, that has jailed them, and that has stolen from them.”
Since the October 2025 hurricane, the United States has provided $9 million in humanitarian assistance directly to the Cuban people. The U.S. is now offering an additional $100 million that includes food, hygiene, and water treatment supplies to be distributed to those in need through the Catholic Church and other reliable institutions.
The U.S. is also permitting humanitarian fuel deliveries from Russia and the United States to private entities not affiliated with the regime.
The reason Cubans don’t have electricity, fuel, or food is not due to the embargo or because of a so-called oil blockade. It is because the regime continues with failed communist economics, incompetence, and corruption.
The Miami Herald in Florida has reported, the regime’s state-owned enterprise, GAESA, and its subsidiaries have looted at least $18 billion from the Cuban people - money that should have gone to food, fuel, hospitals, medicine, and power. Instead, it has funded regime elites, luxury hotels, security services, and the machinery of repression.
It is incumbent on the Cuban regime to enact immediate economic and political reforms. “We are asking very simple things,” said Ambassador Waltz. “Open the economy. Free political prisoners. Stop treating private citizens as a threat. Stop blaming America for the misery produced by Havana and their failed policies.”
The Cuban regime remains one of the worst human rights abusers in the world, said Ambassador Waltz. For more than 60 years, it has crushed dissent, censored speech, jailed political prisoners, driven families into exile that have tried to escape, turning an island 90 miles from America into a prison for its own people.
The Cuban regime conspires and collaborates with enemies and adversaries of democracy, said Ambassador Waltz. “It has supported Russia’s war in Ukraine, including by allowing thousands of mercenaries to fight for the Russian army; it is hosting Chinese surveillance facilities; it is providing support for terrorist organizations; and it is undermining other democracies in the region.”
The Cuban regime exports repression, it props up America’s adversaries, and it invites them into our hemisphere, warned Ambassador Waltz. That’s why President Donald Trump declared Cuba a threat to U.S. national security in his Executive Order of January 29, 2026.
The United States urges all Security Council Member States to stop voting for the Cuban regime’s annual anti-embargo resolution in the UN General Assembly; insist that humanitarian assistance goes directly to the Cuban people; and publicly call for political reforms.
The Cuban people need food, fuel, medicine, electricity, and freedom, and a government that stops stealing their future.